mental second wind

But I wear it proudly, as the sign of an epic weekend. If I’m sore, it generally represents something awesome – miles hiked, waters paddled, thousands of photographs, dozens of moonbounce jumps…

But the paradox is that these events which wear down my body somehow invigorate my mind. So, even though I had to fight to keep my eyes open while reading at 9:30pm, the moment my body was fully unwound, totally at rest in a dark room, my brain rallied. I call it the mental second wind.

I also call it the reason I blog.

*

Hopefully a glass of red wine will slow down the hamster wheels in my head.

*

This could probably be blamed on the book I am within 50 pages of finishing. This one. After so many horrifying and delightful pages of self-conscious rambling, my brain has definitely caught the pattern. I love the rhythms of that book, and have followed every ridiculous tangent, feeling somewhat relieved that other people think that way, but also terrified by the idea that someone might be thinking that way ALL THE TIME! HOW DO YOU SURVIVE? It’s exhausting. Writing that book would have been exhausting.

Though, I suspect writing any book is exhausting.

*

I have a drinking problem.

Namely, that every time I swallow a beverage that is not water, it somehow gets caught in the back of my throat. Often it just burns a little, but sometimes I have a coughing fit. And perhaps it doesn’t happen all the time, but more often lately than I’d prefer. Drinking beverages is generally something one would like to do without pain…assuming one isn’t drinking hard liquor, in which case all bets are off.

No, I am not drinking hard liquor.

*

A few nights ago, I was reading in bed when a daddy longlegs spider stepped onto the book FROM MY CHIN! Meaning, it had just crawled across my face, and I hadn’t any clue. I was so shocked, and impressed, that I let it continue the journey all the way to the foot of the bed.

Though I watched it the whole way.

And then, when it came back, and tried to walk across my hand, I might have squealed a bit and tossed it across the room.

*

Raise your hand if you’ve spent hours on end following links in Wikipedia.

I do it regularly, mostly when I become intrigued by a book or a person and want to do some research. But one of my friends, one of the geeky ones who is still in school but who doesn’t appear shocked when I say that I would NEVER get another degree, has taken it to a whole other level.

One night, for kicks, and for hours on end, we researched cats on Wikipedia. Not house cats, but every species of the felidae family. Go ahead. It’s amazing. We discovered that leopards (or is it cougars? This inability to retain any specific terminology is a big reason I’d never survive graduate school.) don’t really exist – that it’s just another name for a whole collection of other cats.